


Pink and Black and Blue (For You)

by thatdamneddame



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 14:11:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1944168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatdamneddame/pseuds/thatdamneddame
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bones breaks his foot, which is pretty ironic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pink and Black and Blue (For You)

**Author's Note:**

> I broke my foot and decided that I should funnel my angst into fluffy fic. It's the most productive thing I've done in the past month.
> 
> Title from "Bruises" by Chairlift.
> 
> Thanks, as always, to prettyasadiagram for the beta.

Bones breaks his foot, which is pretty ironic.

“It’s not ironic; it’s _mor_ onic,” Bones grumbles. He stabs sullenly at his mashed potatoes and it takes all of Jim’s self-control not to laugh.

“I know, I know—you’re a doctor.” Jim reaches forward to ruffle his hair, but Bones slaps him away. “After dinner we can watch Discovery Health Channel and I’ll let you eat that entire pint of peach cobbler Ben & Jerry’s we bought.” He does love the bastard, after all. Plus, he broke his fucking foot.

Bones doesn’t smile or say thank you or anything like that, but he slumps forward as much as he can in his seat and this time when Jim reaches forward and runs his fingers through Bones’s hair, Bones lets him.

 

***

 

After dinner, Jim builds Bones a tower of pillows to rest his foot on and brings him the pint of ice cream as promised. They watch a five-part documentary on the history of surgery and Jim doesn’t complain once.

Somewhere around part three, Bones mumbles, “You don’t have to stay if you don’t want. I can get myself to bed.”

Aside from the fact that that’s a hideous lie—Jim lugged one of their folding chairs out of the garage and into the shower just this afternoon so Bones can bathe without putting any weight on his foot or throwing out his back lowering himself into the tub—Jim’s too content to move. Bones has his foot propped up on the ottoman and Jim is half asleep in his lap as Bones runs his fingers through Jim’s hair.

They don’t do this a lot anymore, just chill out on the couch for hours, happy just to be together. They used to, back when they had two separate mailing addresses but never really spent a night apart. Now, though, Bones doesn’t really change his schedule around so much unless it’s for Joanna and Jim stays late at the office going over grants and rewriting budgets trying to keep people employed and help as many people as he can with increasingly shrinking funds. They’re comfortably in love, happily domestic, but Jim misses this sometimes—hanging out with Bones just to be with him.

“I’m comfortable,” is what Jim tells Bones instead and presses a kiss to Bones’s thigh.

“If you’re sure,” Bones says, already turning the TV volume back up.

Jim is sure. He’s always been sure about Bones.

 

***

 

Somewhere in part four of the documentary, Jim falls asleep, which is fine by him because rib spreaders freak him out. He wakes up hours later, back sore from sleeping on the couch, to find the DVD menu playing on repeat and Bones passed out, snoring softly. Jim really doesn’t want to move him, but Bones is already going to bitch up a storm tomorrow about his foot—Jim doesn’t want to add the mother of all cricks in the neck to the mix.

Not that Bones doesn’t bitch up a storm when Jim gently shakes him awake and prods him upstairs and into their bed, where there is another fortress of pillows waiting for him. But it’s the familiar kind of bitching, worn around the edges, like that Johns Hopkins shirt of his Jim stole three months into dating—just something comfortably Bones. Besides, if he’s feeling well enough to complain about Jim’s cold hands and how he’s fine on the couch, really, then his foot’s not hurting him too badly. Still, Jim puts the little orange bottle of pills on Bones’s nightstand next to a glass of water.

“I’m fine, Jim,” Bones tells him, almost asleep again already.

Jim presses a kiss to his temple. “Sure you are. I just think they add to the feng shui of the room.”

Bones tries to swat Jim in the leg but he’s clearly too wiped to put any energy into it. Jim just laughs and goes to change into his pajamas.

 

***

 

“ _Motherfucker_ ,” Bones snarls at ass o’clock in the morning.

Jim doesn’t care that Bones broke his foot. Jim is too tired for this shit. “Take one of your fucking pills and go back to sleep.”

“Easy for you to say.” Jim can _feel_ Bones roll his eyes, which is fine because he can also hear the rattle of the pill bottle followed by Bones gulping them down with mouthfuls of water. But because Jim is not a totally selfish asshole—and because he wants to go the fuck back to sleep and not have Bones thrash around in pain beside him—he rolls over and cracks open his eyes enough to gauge that Bone’s pillow fortress had come apart sometime in the night.

“Do you need more pillows? Or less?”

Bones attempts to punch a pillow into submission, but it’s one of the decorative throw pillows his mother gave them—and they’ve never actually used them because what the fuck why—so Jim doesn’t care if he ruins it. “I need my damn foot not to be broken.”

Jim takes that as a _the pillows are fine I’m just in pain and hate everything_ , so he just wordlessly helps Bones reassemble to pillows in some sort of order.

“Better?” he asks when they’re done and Bones is settled.

“Better,” Bones agrees, pulling Jim close.

It’s not that comfortable, an ocean of pillows and a heavy–plastic encased foot making it nigh impossible to effectively cuddle, but Bones is warm and Jim can hear the beating of his heart and he falls asleep again almost instantly anyways.

 

***

 

When Bones finds out he has to go on disability for six weeks until his foot heals, well, the less said of that the better.

“And I fucking mean it,” Chapel says later, calling Jim on his cellphone later to reinforce that Bones can’t even come in to work on the massive piles of paperwork that eternally cover his desk.

“He can’t even drive right now,” Jim reminds her. It’s probably better that way, or else Jim would have to take off a month from work just to babysit Bones and make sure he doesn’t try to escape or put any weight on his foot.

Chapel snorts. “Just tell him that I’ve told all the interns to ask him the most inane questions they can if he shows his face around here.”

Jim doesn’t do that because he knows Bones will only take it as a challenge, but he has to admire Chapel for knowing exactly how to get underneath Bones’s skin.

 

***

 

"We won't stay long," Uhura promises when Jim opens the front door to find her and Spock standing on his front step. "Just came by to see how the patient was doing. We also come bearing gifts."

Spock dutifully holds up the casserole dish they brought. “It’s kale quinoa pilaf. To facilitate proper bone healing.”

Jim grins like it’s Christmas—Bones is going to hate that so much. “Well, I’m not going to turn down food. Come on in.”

 

***

 

The kale and quinoa pilaf goes over about as well as Jim expected. Bones takes one whiff, raises his eyebrow as high as it will go, and asks, “What? Horse food wasn’t on sale at Farm and Tractor?”

Spock frowns at him. “As a trained medical professional, I’m sure you appreciate the specific nutrients your body requires during the healing process.”

Back in the day Jim used to worry Bones and Spock were going to kill each other, but now he's 80 percent, maybe 85 percent, sure that this antagonism is just how they express deep-seated affection. Either way, Jim and Uhura have pretty much learned to ignore it.

"I brought you a hostess gift." She pulls a bottle of whiskey out of her purse. "For when baby goes to bed."

They both glance over to Bones, who is currently berating a very bored-looking Spock about the wonders of modern medicine and how eating like a goddamn hipster on an extended gap year won't do anything but make him lose the will to live.

"I don't even care that you bought me weird Swedish whiskey," Jim tells her honestly. "You're a life saver."

Uhura rolls her eyes at him because even though she volunteered him kicking and screaming to be her international alcohol taste-testing buddy, she still thinks it’s weak how he almost cried that one time she made him drink a bottle of Cynar. “Just let me know if there’s anything we can do to help.”

Spock is now lecturing Bones on the health benefits of kale in one’s life, regardless of bone fractures. Bones looks like he’s wishing he were a bit more stable on one leg right now so he could beat Spock to death with his crutches.

“He’ll just be happy that you stopped by,” Jim says, because it’s true. For all Bones says that he wants to bear the indignity of his broken foot alone, Jim knows that it’s all horseshit. Bones once tried to go to work when he had the flu and willingly endured the three-hour reaming out from Chapel because if he's going to suffer he wants other people to know about it. “We should be able to figure out the rest.”

They let Spock and Bones argue it out and after, when they finally run out of steam, they reheat the damn pilaf and eat it while Uhura forces Jim to drink the actually-not-bad weird Swedish whiskey. Bones smiles and laughs and picks fights with Spock even as he makes Jim get him seconds. And then, when they finally leave, Uhura presses a box set of _The Wire_ into Bones’s hands, “So you don’t end up in some sad Netflix hole like that time Jim went to that conference.”

Jim’s a little sad when Spock and Uhura leave because the night was exactly what both of them needed.

 

***

 

Lying in bed, Bones harrumphs, “I’m fucking useless right now. One busted-up foot and I’m entirely out of commission.”

“You’ll get better.” Jim had watched Bones wobble and sway on crutches and one foot as he tried to stand as he brushed his teeth before bed. He’ll get better at it—Jim knows from a long childhood in the country getting into ridiculous accidents—but for now everything’s difficult and everything hurts and Jim just wishes he could make it all go away, kiss everything better.

Bones glares at him. “Don’t placate me. I know.”

The most difficult thing in loving Bones, Jim has found, is that the man hates to be comforted. He just wants to stew in his unhappiness for a while and narrate how much his life sucks to anyone who will listen. Give him a good twenty-minute bitch session and he’ll be right as rain, Jim knows this all too well, but that doesn’t take away the compulsion to soothe.

“I’m just reminding you,” Jim tells him. “Just like I’m going to remind you that I’m taking the next week off work so I can help your sadass out when you’re hopping around the house.”

Because their love is true, Bones throws a pillow at Jim’s head. “Yeah, you’re a regular Susie Homemaker.”

Jim laughs and throws the pillow back. “I’m _your_ Susie Homemaker.”

“Gee, how did I ever get so lucky?” Bones asks, sarcasm thick but he’s smiling the way he only ever smiles when they’re alone—lazy and broad, lighting up his entire face. When Bones smiles like that, Jim can’t help but feel like he’s the lucky one.

 

***

 

Jim supposes that the responsible adult way to spend his week home with Bones would be to get caught up on laundry and clean the kitchen and all those other boring household chores that Bones usually does. Instead, they marathon all of _The Wire_ and Jim makes a Pinterest board dedicated to healthy calcium and protein rich recipes and Bones has a tiny meltdown about not wanting to do anything Spock says he should do.

After three or four days, his foot stops hurting all the damn time and he starts to get the hang of crutches. By Friday morning he’s hopping around the kitchen making himself coffee and trying to trip Jim with his crutches.

Sunday night, climbing into bed after setting the alarm, Jim says, “We should do this again.”

“Sleep at a reasonable hour?” Bones asks. He’s currently laying on his back with his legs in the air trying to put on his pajama pants over his walking boot. Jim thinks he should get a medal for not laughing at Bones’s stuck turtle impression.

“No, take some time off work together.”

“I can break my other foot if you’d like,” Bones tells him dryly.

Jim turns off the bedroom light and crawls into bed. “Or we could, you know, take a vacation like normal people.”

Bones seems to contemplate this. “Might be nice,” he hedges at last, the only person in the world who thinks organizing a vacation is a hassle.

“We’ll bring Jo,” Jim goes on, getting into it now. “We’ll go to the beach. I’ll tell Chapel not to let anyone call you. It’ll be great. I might even read a book.”

“I’d like just to sleep for a week,” Bones tells him. “Actually, I’d just like to sleep tonight.”

Jim pokes him in the side, but actually settles down to sleep. “And they say romance is dead.”

Bones reaches out across the mattress and holds on to Jim’s wrist, like he does every night, grounding himself before drifting off to sleep. Before Bones, Jim never used to like being held down, figuratively or literally, but now he has a hard time falling asleep without it. Bones’s thumb absently strokes over the pulse point in Jim’s wrist and he falls asleep in between one heartbeat and the next.

Five more weeks. They can do this.


End file.
